The New International Encyclopædia/Albany, Louisa Maria Caroline

ALBANY, Louisa Maria Caroline, also Aloysia, Countess of (1753-1824). The wife of Charles Edward Stuart (q.v.), grandson of James II. of England. She was the daughter of Prince Gustavus Adolphus of Stolberg-Gedern, who fell in the battle of Leuthen in 1757. During her married life she bore the name of the Countess of Albany. She had no children, her marriage proved an unhappy one, and in order to escape from the ill-usage of her husband, who lived in a state of continual drunkenness, she sought refuge in a nunnery, 1780. At the death of the Prince, in 1788, the court of France allowed her an annual pension of 60,000 livres. She outlived the house of the Stuarts, which became extinct at the death of her brother-in-law, Cardinal York, in 1807. At Florence, where she lived for a long time, her palace was a notable resort for men famous in political and literary circles. Her name and her misfortunes have been transmitted to posterity through the works and autobiography of Alfieri (q.v.), whose mistress she was after the death of the Prince, and through the treasures of the Musée Fabre, founded by another of her lovers. Her body and that of Alfieri repose in the same tomb in the church of Santa Croce at Florence, between the tombs of Machiavelli and Michelangelo. Consult: Lee, The Countess of Albany (London, 1884); Reumont, Die Gräfin von Albany (Berlin, 1860).